Bliss in Marital Degradation
by profoundlycan
Summary: Post 3.25 Season Finale. Cristina reflects on her losses and all that has changed since the day of her wedding. MeredithCristina implied.


**Bliss in Marital Degradation**

I do not know exactly how I ended up here or why, but I can tell you that by process of elimination, weighing the pros and cons, and crossing barriers I never thought I possessed brought me to this point. Here I lay, with my best friend spooning me and her loud snoring keeping me awake, but I would not have it any other way.

Meredith and I, we were two broken women, if not by the men in our lives but by our families and friends trying to push our jigsaw selves into a puzzle that we did not belong. The men we once believed to love, cherish, practically worship the professional ground they walked on broke us as we broke them, damaging any chance of what we considered a normal relationship in our skewed eyes. Now here we are six months later, reveling and struggling with ourselves and our careers, thirty plus years of believing we were these women who would love men and one day commit ourselves to these men only to discover we were happier with women, with ourselves as we were.

As children and adolescents, Meredith and I have strived to please our mothers, to both be comfortable in our own skin and prayed to the fictional storyteller in the sky that the women that bore us would one day accept who we were and let us be ourselves.

Meredith had been the rebel. She dyed her hair pink; refused to be the perfect, ambitious daughter her mother dreamt she'd one day have - a miniature of herself in all respects. That dream only came true in one form, and that was that her daughter eventually came to the realization that she did wish to become a surgeon, but not follow in the large footsteps her mother had left. Meredith is brilliant, but she is not stupid, and she knows that the legendary Dr. Ellis Grey would not be easily surpassed. Setting aside physical similarities, Meredith is not her mother by any means, but she works hard and loves her career for all its nuances and has an excellent bedside manner, something I myself lack most of the time but do not deem a necessary quality as a doctor that I have to possess.

I, on the other hand, conformed to my mother's vision and was her porcelain wind-up doll throughout my youth, and I'll admit that I still am at times, because I do love my mother for all that she went through after her and my father divorced, even if I do not agree with many of those choices now.

While Meredith was essentially raised in a single-parent home with nannies and caretakers, I was driven from my mother's to my father's back to my mother's more often than I'd like to remember. The Sunday evenings when my mother and stepfather would get me from my father's small studio were always a battle. Though my culture sometimes dictates it, my father instilled a sense of feminism in me I never felt when at home with my mother, where she would shove her beliefs down my throat that a woman's place was at home and to cater to her husband. I may have worn her dresses, let her fuss with my hair and play with my make-up, but if there was one thing we fought about, it was about a woman's place as well as my essential need to be a goal-oriented, bloodthirsty, career woman.

Burke had molded me in his careful hands into a woman he acknowledged that I could never be, and when he had almost had me down that aisle, stripped of the dignity I once used to possess, he was the one to leave rather than me leaving him. Maybe he believed that I only loved his surgeon rather than his person. I am not an easy person to read, and there were many times when he'd mistake me for someone I'm not, purporting what he supposed my beliefs were, but often times missing the target by equators.

Though he was an arrogant, selfish mama's boy, he was mine, and I did – and still do – love him. Seattle Grace lost their top cardiothoracic surgeon like I had lost the love of my life, or so I had thought.

When the panic attack set in at the apartment, Meredith cut me out of the tainted dress, undid the tainted jewelry and lingerie, and wrapped her arms around my tainted body. We both cried for our losses, as her and Derek had in less words called it quits, though he had informed her that she was the love of his life but was, unfortunately, damaged goods. Later when I could finally speak again, I said that she was better off without him, that now that she was helping to pick up the pieces of myself off the cutting room floor, that this is what it was like for me when I had to often do the same for her. She responded with slurred words that her brainless brain surgeon and my heartless heart surgeon should have had penectomies upon graduation from med school, then we wouldn't have suffered at their testosterone-minded egos, and we toasted and continued to slosh liquor and booze down our fronts.

My wedding day had been a massacre for all parties involved. There were no surviving relationships.

Bambi ran into the woods never to return, much like his "bestest buddy". Meredith and I now joke that he and Burke live in a log cabin with no contact to anyone of the outside world, eating squirrels and drinking piss water for nourishment. Callie declined the Chief Resident position and followed the Head of the Gynie Squad to L.A. to pursue other avenues. From what we've heard, she's enjoying the sun and beaches and has a new man that appreciates her. She and Addison work in the same hospital.

Out of the attending staff left standing, Mark was offered Chief of Surgery, a triumphant victory after Derek turned down the opportunity. Six months later, Seattle Grace is still standing and no sexual harassment suits have been issued, to mine and Meredith's surprise, though we both enjoy the much more humorous atmosphere our place of work has now taken, despite all the sickness and disease.

Mark's mini-me, as we now call Alex, switched specialties from surgery to Obstetrics/Gynecology. We often still sit together at lunch, brow-beating him to the ground for officially becoming the Frat Boy of the Gynie Squad and pining for Ava, though he's become much better about it. Barbie took a month-long sabbatical, only to return a completely different person. We're not sure where or why or how, but she's much more tolerable and doesn't grate on our nerves like she used to. I still hate her chipper attitude first thing in the morning though.

The dynamic at Seattle Grace has changed to the point no one would realize that an intern chopped an LVAD wire, or that Attendings and Residents dated and married Interns (something Mark has shocked the entire staff by enforcing that no one does), or that a certain perfectionist Intern and cardiothoracic surgeon almost sabotaged their careers to cover their shortcomings. Meredith and I, along with Alex and Izzie sometimes, reflect on the past year and a half, not quite believing all that has happened or how a hospital can make a comeback to having professional boundaries once again.

I sigh and glance over my shoulder at the woman that's helped turn my life around and who keeps me on my toes, though I often bitch that she does no such thing when she implies it. If someone told me that I'd be sharing a bed with my best friend in a committal relationship two years ago, I would have sincerely contemplated submitting them for a psych evaluation. Perhaps I'd have been more lenient if I would have known the person would be correct.


End file.
